Posted on 07/30/2008 10:56:36 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Jerome Eisenberg, a specialist in faked ancient art, is claiming that the disc and its indecipherable text is not a relic dating from 1,700BC, but a forgery that has duped scholars since Luigi Pernier, an Italian archaeologist, "discovered" it in 1908 in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete.
Pernier was desperate to impress his colleagues with a find of his own, according to Dr Eisenberg, and needed to unearth something that could outdo the discoveries made by Sir Arthur Evans, the renowned English archaeologist, and Federico Halbherr, a fellow Italian...
Dr Eisenberg, who has conducted appraisals for the US Treasury Department and the J. Paul Getty Museum, highlighted the forger's error in creating a terracotta "pancake" with a cleanly cut edge. Nor, he added, should it have been fired so perfectly. "Minoan clay tablets were not fired purposefully, only accidentally," he said. "Pernier may not have realised this."
Each side of the disc bears a bar composed of four or five dots which one scholar described as "the oldest example of the use of natural punctuation".
Dr Eisenberg believes that it was added to lead scholars astray -- "another oddity to puzzle them, and a common trick among forgers". The Greek authorities have refused to give Dr Eisenberg permission to examine the disc outside its display case, arguing that it is too delicate to be moved.
His misgivings could be laid to rest by a thermoluminescence test -- a standard scientific dating test -- but the authorities had refused, he said. In Rome, this test cast doubt recently on the provenance of another iconic archeological object.
(Excerpt) Read more at entertainment.timesonline.co.uk ...
Oui! Ja!
The Phaistos inscription is unique. Linear A, Linear B, and Cretan hieroglyphic was first discovered by Evans, who spent the rest of his life denying any of the writing systems concealed Greek. Linear B is a syllabary, was apparently adapted from Linear A, and various claims have been made for Linear A — that it hides an Anatolian language (Barry Fell), or Semitic (uh, I forget who), etc — but it has been generally admitted that Linear A was not used to write Greek (even though a couple of mavericks say they’ve cracked it as Greek). In “Lost Languages” the opinion is expressed that, short of finding another archive of tablets, Linear A will never be cracked because the known samples are too small (compared with Linear B, found in quantity by Blegen on his first day digging at Pylos). Cretan hieroglyphic was found in just a few examples (not sure if there was a tablet or two, or not, or merely short inscriptions on pots or something).
If it is unique, how did Mr. Fell translate it in your #8 above?
A royal seal pressed into clay, with a Minoan hieroglyphic inscription (?), found at Knossos. If these four characters are Linear A as they appear to be, using my best guesses from Barry Fell's work on Linear A, they represent the consonants lu - ak/ag - ke - su/yu (the slashes indicate that I'm not sure which sign to use). ESOP Volume 4, No. 77 (p 26) shows the first two symbols and two others, translated as lugal that is, the king. The first character lu is a loan word meaning "man royal". Figure from p 37, The Aegean Civilizations by Peter Warren, 1989, a volume of the The Making of the Past series.
I took a look at this disc again and my translation comes out to approximate “Eat More Ovaltine”...not sure about the date.
I’ll have a large Phaistos Disc with pepperoni, black olives, and cryptic runes.
I do that with scrambled eggs - which ain't no omelet!
Actually, that sounds like a *great* idea for a restaurant concept.
Uh, to me.
I guess this is an example of how half of all restaurants fail in the first year.
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